Religion Dispatches
…ve concealed evidence that American captives are being held alive in South-East Asia.” Trump may have claimed to valorize those who “weren’t captured” just a year ago, but his appearance at the mall on behalf of those who supposedly have been captured and never released marks another milestone in the un-reality show of the campaign. Aside from the compliments for the “beautiful” bikes and praise for the Hells Angels’-style protection they supposed…
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…sexuals at a gay bar,” he said. He later added: “The good news is that at least 50 of these pedophiles are not going to be harming children anymore. The bad news is that a lot of the homos in the bar are still alive, so they’re going to continue to molest children and recruit people into their filthy homosexual lifestyle.” Anderson explained that he didn’t approve of the shooter’s actions … but only because he thinks the victims should have been p…
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…When I was young and thought I knew everything, I started off working with East African refugees with the goal of converting them. But as I got sucked into their lives and spent more and more time with them (it’s been over a decade now) I transitioned into being a friend and activist and eventually a neighbor. Being in long-term relationships with people who are very different from me changed my life. It opened my eyes to how bad things are in the…
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…lled, for example, the Journalists and Writers Foundation, Dialogue Middle East, and the Entrepreneurs’ and Businesspeople’s Association. From what I could tell, these were independent service and professional networking organizations that were loosely affiliated with Hizmet but not directed by it. At least this was my impression—I do not profess to be an expert on the organization of the movement. I also visited one of the social service centers…
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…America’s closest ally and the supposed beacon of gay rights in the Middle East. These are just three antecedents to the coupling of Islamophobia with muscular pro-LGBT liberalism we see today. Senior Republican leaders, for their part, only jumped on the bandwagon this past year. It’s been speculated that they’re following in the footsteps of right-wing, anti-immigrant European politicians, such as the Netherlands’ Pim Fortuyn—who held that the “…
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…y. I was ordained in 1990, so 26 years ago. I was ordained into the Kansas East Annual Conference, which is now part of the Great Plains Conference. And I’ve always kept my membership here. Prior to that, I had been the Dean of Students at Candler School of Theology at Emory in Atlanta. My most recent appointment, which I’m just finishing up in the next couple of weeks, is in Edgerton, Kansas. It’s a small town just outside of Kansas City. Our att…
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…w to terrorism. The earliest terrorist groups in Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe were mostly secular nationalists. The most dangerous decade in terrorism, the 1970s, was dominated by groups like Weather Underground, the Japanese Red Army, and the Marxist Fadai’yan. In fact, until 2000, the majority of suicide bombings were carried out by the enthno-Marxist Tamil Tigers. Yet, regardless of the differing ideologies, the consistent…
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…road. Mothers also left their children to pursue professional degrees back East. Neither was there a deeper discussion about the meanings of contested concepts like “religious freedom,” apart from the concern was expressed for Christians being required to offer their professional services to gay customers. However, there is precedent in the Mormon community for putting aside religious convictions when engaging in public services. My Mormon uncle o…
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…est in Romania willing to offer them the Eucharist when the P.C. police in Indiana would deny it to them. But a single priest, who may or may not exist, in Romania is not the problem. Heimbach is just the most visible of Orthodoxy’s new neo-fascist converts. An even cursory perusal of the “alt-right” web reveals a large and growing love affair between the threatening margins of our modern Western political discourse and the ancient Christian faith…
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…ditions’ toolkits. For interfaith families on the other hand, Passover and Easter, or “East-over” as my sister has taken to calling it, is, in many ways, more of a balancing act, as families seek to honor competing observances and traditions even as they try to steer clear of everything from anti-Semitism to the potentially exclusionary language of the seder. Those challenges are thrown into particular relief on years like this one, when the holid…
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